The Bike Shed

228: Friends and Food (George Brocklehurst)

January 14th, 2020  |  50 mins 7 secs

On this week's episode, Steph is joined by George Brocklehurst, a Development Director in the NYC thoughtbot office. Steph and George chat about the variety of projects and technologies that caught their attention during thoughtbot's recent internal hackathon. They also dive into Gitsh, a dedicated shell for Git commands, as they chat about preferred git workflows and George shares his recent adventure in updating Gitsh to support tab completion.

227: Hacks and Cheats

January 7th, 2020  |  32 mins 31 secs

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph discuss their recent holiday hackathon efforts building a game in Elm. They discuss their experiences with Elm and the broader prospects of using Elm in more production applications. They also discuss the new git subcommands "git switch" and "git restore", and round things out with a listener question concerning FactoryBot and "minimum viable factories".

226: Bespoke Nonsense

December 31st, 2019  |  40 mins 58 secs

On this week's episode, in celebration of the new year, Thom shares the 2019 blooper reel! Words are hard and here's the audio to prove it. Listen to all of the silly mishaps, goofs, and general nonsense captured in between the moments of "professional podcasting". Chris and Steph also reflect on their top themes of 2019 and discuss New Year Systems vs New Year Resolutions.

225: Pepper in Some Security

December 10th, 2019  |  40 mins 41 secs

On this week's episode, Steph gets Chris to share his biggest developer regrets over the years. They also revisit a favorite topic of estimation and story points, and round out the conversation with some details from the world of application security.

224: The One Manhattan Rule

December 3rd, 2019  |  41 mins 37 secs

On this week's episode, Chris catches us up on his latest keyboard adventures and Steph shares her first impression of working with Ember.

They also dive into Chris's experience triaging errors with Sentry, their love for Elm, how teams achieve a consistent velocity, and Steph's upcoming workshop on how to stay agile when building a healthcare product. To bring it home, they respond to a listener who's wondering when is it a good idea to convert a loose data structure (e.g.: hash) into a class?

223: Terrible and Easy

November 26th, 2019  |  44 mins 52 secs

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph discuss identifying refactoring opportunities by highlighting overly coupled code and Chris announces that he has advanced his vim setup into the 21st century by making the switch to Neovim.

They also respond to a timely question from a listener who's thinking about learning vim, which raises the important question: is vim still relevant? And if so, how does one get started? Rounding out the conversation, they discuss treating the database as a product's first (or last) line of defense.

222: That Eureka Moment

November 12th, 2019  |  36 mins 29 secs

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris dive into the world of crafting pull requests for optimal code review, as well as the flip side of providing code review. How can we make it easy for reviewers, and as reviewers, how can we make it easy for our teammates to incorporate our suggestions?

They also discuss the world of testing, from integration to visual to unit testing, and some of the tools an practices they use at each level.

Lastly, they discuss Steph's continued pairing adventures and possibly finding her max on the pairing front, a quick update on mechanical keyboards, and Steph shares a teaser of an upcoming workshop she'll be hosting around how to stay agile when building health tech products.

221: An Informed Opinion

November 5th, 2019  |  45 mins 13 secs

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph catch up on recent client adventures, revisit their feelings on using let in rspec, and spend a bit of time outside their respective comfort zones. There's also some talk about nearly full-time pairing, mechanical keyboards, debugging thorny datetime issues, and how we interact with our developer tools and workflows.

220: Adequately Fun

October 29th, 2019  |  52 mins 29 secs

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph chat about their new client projects, VimScript, and ways to automate refreshing materialized views in tests. They also play the game Overrated/Underrated, created by Tyler Cowen, and respond to a CS student who is feeling overwhelmed by the various technologies and looking to transition from tutorials to meaningful projects.

219: Seeking That Middle Option

October 22nd, 2019  |  36 mins 2 secs

On this week's episode, Steph catches us up on her ever-growing collection of mechanical keyboards, Chris talks about his recent purchase of an apple watch, and they follow up a previous discussion around case-sensitivity (or insensitivity) in URLs and email addresses. They round out the discussion with a chat about writing blog posts and some postgres fun, and finally discuss the merits and drawbacks of monorepos.

218: Finesse in Quitting (Brittany Martin)

October 15th, 2019  |  41 mins 54 secs

On this week's episode, Steph is joined by Brittany Martin, an avid Rubyist and the host of the Ruby on Rails Podcast. They discuss Brittany's passion for roller derby and her upcoming Ruby conference talk: "Hire Me, I'm Excellent at Quitting." They also discuss using AWS Serverless, troubleshooting Postgress connection errors and working with Google Pay and Apple Wallet to introduce digital tickets.

217: A Vote For Reasonableness

October 8th, 2019  |  32 mins 47 secs

On this week's episode, Steph shares an update on her mechanical keyboard adventures and provides a summary for the Ruby pipeline operator being reverted. Chris gets Steph's opinion on a possible improvement around using materialized views in tests and describes a recent debugging adventure he and Steph went on. They also discuss a listener question regarding encouraging companies to use Ruby and Rails and asking how we identify ourselves as developers. Finally, they round out the conversation with a clarification around public vs private GraphQL APIs.

216: I'm Not the Best Criminal

October 1st, 2019  |  39 mins 16 secs

On this week's episode, Steph recounts an issue with an email client that lowercases URLs and Chris ponders the art of logging and using structured logs. They also highlight a plugin that improves TypeScript support in Vim, how the Pinterest team celebrates the "retirement" of code, and respond to a listener who is debating between refactoring their app or investing in a full rewrite.

215: Start With People

September 24th, 2019  |  35 mins

On this week's episode, Steph returns from vacation and Chris makes some noise about a fantastic new button. They discuss Steph's continued adventures in search of the perfect mechanical keyboard and then dig into two listener questions on landing a first job as a developer and what frameworks and languages to focus on, as well as discussing some of the common objections to GraphQL.

214: Have You Tried Refreshing the Page?

September 17th, 2019  |  38 mins 43 secs

On this week's episode, Matt Sumner guest stars to discuss his recent adventures on a project that uses React, TypeScript and GraphQL. Along the way, Matt and Chris discuss VS Code features, Apollo caching and reflect upon their first year as Development Directors. 


213: Admins Matter Too

September 10th, 2019  |  35 mins 18 secs

On this week's episode, Steph discusses a mini design sprint she led to help validate an internal admin tool while Chris muses on the merits of net negative lines of code on a project. They dig into the idea that while code can certainly be an asset, it may also be a liability. They investigate ActiveSupport::MessageVerifier for secure time-sensitive tokens. Steph shares details about her recent visit to the Ruby on Rails Podcast and Chris shares the recording for a talk he gave on understanding technology choices. Lastly, they round out the conversation with a listener question about build times and lock files and how to organize and split up our tests.